If you meet the Buddha

The most violent line in Zen is a warning about souvenirs.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

Chapter 12 of 12 in The masters were funny

Linji told his monks that if they met the Buddha they should kill him. Meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. He includes your parents in the list, which is how you know he is not talking about people.

Linji was the ninth century Chinese master the Rinzai school is named after. The line gets printed on posters, usually by people who like the sound of it.

He is going after the souvenir. Something opens for a moment, and the mind, which is a museum curator, immediately builds a small exhibit around it: the teacher who caused it, the phrase that triggered it, the tradition it belongs to, the person I now am for having had it. That exhibit is a Buddha on the road. Every time I meet it I stop and look, and looking at it is a different thing from what happened.

So the thing to kill is the figure in my head that stands between me and the plain fact of the moment I am in.

I do not want to do this. The stories are lovely. Having read them feels like progress, and the feeling of progress is what Linji is telling his monks to put down.

The line comes for the eleven stories before this one too. The mullah under the streetlamp, the overflowing cup, the man with the trunk on his head. If they become a set of positions I hold, a shelf, then I have collected twelve Buddhas and I am further away than when I started, with better anecdotes.